Thursday, June 30, 2011

“It was spectacular. There’s nothing I can say to describe how truly amazing it was,” Mr Corliss told Barcroft Media.
“The video doesn’t even come close to explaining it. It’s so much better than what you see in the footage.

“When you’re actually there flying at these speeds, that close to the ground, flying in between trees like a bird... It’s the closest I have come to living that childhood dream of flying like a bird.”

Autum's father, Batin Ashante, insists that his daughter was accepted at UConn, but that UConn began 'hedging and fudging' about whether she would be welcome there.

I thought 13 was young to be going to play hoops, then I read on to see that she's an academic prodigy. I need to remember UConn is a fine school for engineers, philosophers, lawyers, and such, not just a hoops powerhouse.

Apart from the music, both theme and incidental, the show doesn't feel terribly dated.

I don't remember if it tones down a little or not, but Bruce Willis is trying a little too hard in these first few episodes.

The clock sequence in the pilot is well filmed, if the ladder and the rationale for the old German to climb out on it after the diamonds are unbelievable. ("You didn't think I would do it, did you?" Uh, of course not, because you have a gun and a hostage -- it was your stupidest possible play.)

Same as with any show more than a certain number of years old, it would have to be half the length if made today, since characters would just use google and solve the mystery in about two minutes. "Hmm. What could these numbers be? Let's research and brainstorm all night." Then drive to the Hall of Records to put the longitude and latitude to a map once figured out. Now: "Google the numbers. Search result one is a map showing the exact spot. Look at the spot in street view, see that clock? Let's go ..."

The freeze frame at the end of episode 2 was really unfortunate. As that final scene started it, I remembered in a vivid flash that's how the episode ended.

Not that it was that similar, but watching Moonlighting reminded me how much I liked and miss Life.

Since his tragic death from cancer at age 32, comedian Bill Hicks's legend and stature have only grown, and this unique documentary tells his story, blending live footage, interviews and animation to fill in the details of a life cut short. A comic's comic and unflagging critic of hypocrisy and cultural emptiness, Hicks was one of a kind, a Lenny Bruce for the late 20th century, and few are more deserving of this in-depth biographic treatment.

'Low business costs (18 percent below the national average) and a smart labor force (42 percent have a college degree) make North Carolina’s capital an attractive spot for employers,' the magazine wrote. 'Job seekers get it: The net migration rate to Raleigh was the second highest in the U.S. over the past five years.'

Lyrics obviously focus on the accident and a weirdly serene sense of calm, lines like 'blood on the ground/blood on the sand' and 'The nurses climbed up' paint a macabre picture that works really well with the minor chords and sharp guitar sound and again, the vocals are produced in such a way as to sound effected, here they sound a little flat and distant, but that's the great thing about Fall albums, the way in which Mark's vocals are recorded makes a difference every time, he can he tinny, muffled, overly loud or indecipherable (most times) but always effective with the bunch of songs recorded.

Unused dollar coins have been quietly piling up in Federal Reserve vaults in breathtaking numbers, thanks to a government program that has required their production since 2007.

And even though the neglected mountain of money recently grew past the $1 billion mark, the U.S. Mint will keep making more and more of the coins under a congressional mandate.

I do. I want them. I ask for them all the time. I love the satisfying clink they make when dropped into the kids' piggy banks. I like to say "Sacagawea". If I were tipping the kid at Starbucks, I'd like to be able to say, "Here's a Millard Fillmore for your trouble, sport," flip the coin in the air at him like they used to do to pay newsies in the old black-and-whites, then saunter off with the air of a man who may, just may, have a pocket full of failed President coinage. Paper dollars are for suckers. Genuine coin of the realm for this fella.

Monday, June 27, 2011

The California law would have imposed $1,000 fines on stores that sold violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appeals to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

The definitions tracked language from decisions upholding laws regulating sexual content. In 1968, in Ginsberg v. New York, the court allowed limits on the distribution to minors of sexual materials like what it called “girlie magazines” that fell well short of obscenity, which is unprotected by the First Amendment.

For or against any kind of limits on what can be shown in video games, or restricting their sales to minors on any grounds, can we all agree that it makes no for the court to rule, in effect, that states can't restrict businesses from selling video games that feature a playable male character inserting a knife into the abdomen of a woman, but the state can restrict the sale of video games that feature a male character inserting his penis into a the vagina of a woman? The former is despicable, the latter is ... well ... ~waggles eyebrows~ birds and the bees and natural as you please.

If I'm missing something or misstating the problem, by all means correct me. As it is, I think we've got some mental defectives/moral monsters sitting on the Supreme Court.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

The story of the science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., who served as the mask of Alice Sheldon, a former Chicago debutante, had a similarly tragic ending. For Sheldon, the value of an alter ego was beyond measure. At first glance, hers seems a familiar narrative of a woman adopting a pen name so she might succeed in a male-dominated genre. But she wasn’t just battling gender bias. Without Tiptree, her prose style, as she once put it, was no more imaginative or compelling than “Enclosed please find payment.” She passed as Tiptree for a decade, thus allowing an emotionally troubled, sexually confused middle-aged woman to experience life as a charismatic, flirtatious man at the height of his creative powers.

Their relationship was complicated. Despite having considered, in darker moments, “taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean,” Sheldon felt that without Tiptree, she was crippled creatively. In the late 1970s, after her identity was unmasked, she was bereft. Although her fans and peers in the sci-fi world were largely supportive of her “coming out,” Sheldon’s efforts to keep writing under her own name (and even other pen names) were halfhearted and futile. (“Some inner gate is shut,” she admitted to a friend.) In 1987, she shot her husband in his sleep and then herself.

After all, what's in a nom de plume? That which we call a Doom by any other name would tweet as sweet.

(It's a stretch, I know, but I don't follow anyone whose twitter handle rhymes with plume or guerre and Doctor Doom just leapt to mind and the guy's there doing it ... )

I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing, the way I’ve been doing it. If that’s painful for you in any way, or fills you with some kind of anguish, I think you know which button on my page you need to push. And we don’t need to talk about it. Ever. EVER.

The entire post is well said. That it had to be said at all, by anyone, ever, is too bad.

Off on a tangent, when I see articles and such about how blogging is dead, this is the kind of thing that makes me chuckle, because you'll notice that, while it's specific to twitter, it couldn't actually be said on twitter. Uncle's good at the twitter machine, but would you have read that if it had been six or seven tweets with "1 of ?" appended at the end? I don't think I'd have stuck it out, or been able to piece it together from the fragments in my stream.

I'm not saying blogging is the thing many back in 1999 thought it would end up being. It may die yet. Facebook, or the next Facebook (once the current incarnation is MySpaced), may kill it off. But twitter won't. Can't. Tweeting, blogging, and facebooking are in no combination mutually excluding.

The two-word phrase one’s self is only appropriate when self is used in a spiritual, philosophical, or psychological sense. In all other cases, one’s self should be replaced with the pronoun oneself.

I'm leaning towards "oneself" as appropriate choice for the tweet above but I'm not confident a case couldn't be made for the self doing the hanging having a psychological distance from the self being hanged in the imagined scenario, thereby introducing the requisite "spiritual, philosophical, or psychological" usage basis for the preference of the two word phrase.

I prefer to think about the grammar of this tweet because IT IS WAY TOO DISTURBING TO THINK ABOUT IT ANY OTHER WAY!

I was experimenting with an idea to make a dollar store pancake writer to make breakfast super fun. Towards the end of my pancake batter I decided to add some food coloring and see what would happen if I used the colored batter to add designs to the regular batter. A happy face seemed the most obvious and fail-proof. Well, once I flipped the pancake over to cook the other side, the face spread and cooked weird, and looked SO CREEPY! My little lady wouldn’t even eat it!

I'm always trying to think of reasons to add maraschino cherries to things, so I immediately thought, "a strategically placed upside-down cherry with the stem still attached could look like an escaped balloon in there." Natch.

Before landing the role that would make him an icon of science-fiction TV, Tom Baker spent six years studying to be a monk, did a stint in the army, worked a construction job, and played an evil wizard in a Ray Harryhausen movie. As resumes go, that's all over the place, and it reminds me of a Dave Foley line from NewsRadio: 'Sounds like a drifter.' But it's somehow perfect for the guy who gave us the most unpredictable incarnation of the Doctor in the history of the show, and helped it achieve both some of its greatest moments and some of its worst.

The picture in this article got me feeling a little wistful. Ms. Sladen is gone. Mr. Courtney is gone. Mr. Marter died tragically young, in 1986 of a heart attack on his 42nd birthday. Tom Baker is 77 years-old with, we all hope and expect, several years of guest starring appearances and voice-over work ahead of him. It's just hard to believe time has marched so steadily onward for all involved ...

The backlash against the lashing out against presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has already begun. Following the Palin blueprint, Bachmann plans on fully leveraging the negative publicity with her base: they see leftist attacks as a point of pride and an indication of strength.

This outpouring of disgust is coming at the expense of the excellent local bloggers in Minnesota who have long tracked and fact-checked Bachmann. Their work will be the uncredited foundation of probably every Bachmann hit piece you'll read between now and 2012. It's begun with the self-destructive chewing-out that Matt Taibbi gave Bachmann in Rolling Stone.

Testing out a new survey service with this post. It's an alpha I found via Empire Avenue called Survcast. Try it out, if you're so inclined:

Despite the official assurances of safety, the unusual sight of a nuclear plant surrounded by water — coming so soon after the still unfolding nuclear disaster that followed the earthquake and tsunami in Japan — has prompted concern and speculation, leading one utility to add a feature to its Web site called “flood rumor control.” It says, “There has been no release of radioactivity and none is expected.”

Every time there's a hurricane, flood, tornado, earthquake, or other natural disaster, it's in the back of my mind, "I wonder if any nuclear power plants are impacted?"

Apparently, 'Doctor Who' star Matt Smith was one of several actors who participated in a recent event called '24 Hour Plays' in Los Angeles. For his part in the event, which tasks writers with scripting a play in one night and having actors perform it the next, Smith played a 'very confused Batman' who wakes up on an autopsy table.

Raleigh, N.C. — At least one shooter opened fired on a passing car along Interstate 540 in Raleigh late Wednesday but missed the man and woman inside, police said.

Kyle Fiske, 23, of Raleigh, and Danielle Johnson, 20, of Cary, were driving on I-540 West, near Glenwood Avenue, shortly before 10 p.m. when another car pulled up to their left, police said. A man inside the second vehicle then opened fire.

A bullet traveled through the front driver's-side and passenger-side windows, but missed both people, police said. Fiske's arm was cut by shattered glass.

'Some guy was like tailgating me,' Fiske says in a 911 call. 'We kept driving, 'cause the guy was on 540, following us.'

This is now the fourth car to be fired upon in the last three months here in the Triangle.

(Newser) – An Amish man's attempt to embrace new technology—and a 12-year-old girl—has landed him in court on charges of child solicitation, police in Indiana say. Willard Yoder, 26, was arrested after turning up in a horse and buggy to meet a girl whose phone he had sent hundreds of lewd images and messages to, the AP reports.

He offered, "I thought she was 13," as an excuse? Really, Amish, really?!

(Newser) – Minority babies now outnumber white infants in the US, preliminary Census estimates show, a finding that indicates racial and ethnic minorities will become the nation's majority by the middle of the century. Just under half of all children under 3 are non-Hispanic whites, down from more than 60% in 1990, the AP reports. Meanwhile, 80% of seniors in America are white, as are 73% of those aged 45-64.

When I saw this on Newser, 40% had voted the story 'Depressing'. Really, racists, really?

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that getting heavier is not just a matter of “calories in, calories out,” and that the mantra: “Eat less and exercise more” is far too simplistic. Although calories remain crucial, some foods clearly cause people to put on more weight than others, perhaps because of their chemical makeup and how our bodies process them. This understanding may help explain the dizzying, often seemingly contradictory nutritional advice from one dietary study to the next.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

This NC Voices series will examine how the Civil War affects people in North Carolina today, 150 years after the start of the war. We’ll look at the legacy of the war and how we remember it and how it shapes our identity as Southerners.

I heard a story from this series earlier in the week and was waiting for it to come online, but it doesn't seem to be available although prior and subsequent stories are. I believe it was Monday, 6/20 but I'm not finding it so I'm not certain. (It's possible it would've been in the Listener Stories section, but not finding it there either.)

Anyways, the one I wanted to share was a man who related the story of his great-great grandfather, who was executed by the Confederacy for desertion. You hear a lot down here about the "courage and honor" of Confederate soldiers, but you don't often hear someone from North Carolina brave enough to point out that it was the deserters who were the true, the only, Confederate heroes.

There's some intriguing material on the site, stories about Civil War monuments, re-enactors, and a few looks at the role of religion in the conflict.

Duncan Kitchin is an amateur astronomer in Oregon. Like many of us, he has a telescope that’s kind of a pain lugging outside (my old ‘scope was the same size and shape as a water heater, leading to much hilarity as it sat in the living room). Duncan got tired of dragging it out when it was clear, then hauling back inside when the observing was done.

What’s a guy to do?

Well, if you’re an astronomer and a Doctor Who fan, the solution is obvious: pour a concrete pad, install the permanent mount for the ‘scope, and then make yourself a protective shell around the whole thing… shaped like the TARDIS!

'This is going to be able to populate a database of every tree in the United States,' Kress said. 'I mean that's millions and millions and millions of trees, so that would be really neat.'

It's also the first real chance for citizens to directly access some of the science based on the nearly 5 million specimens kept by the U.S. National Herbarium at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The collection began in 1848 and is among the world's 10 largest plant collections.

Very cool. Just don't defoliate the trees in your local park or forest to get leaf pictures!

(NEWSER) – Enough with the grunting already, say Wimbledon officials who have grown tired of what they consider to be distracting roars made by the tournament's female competitors. With shrieks hitting 105 decibels (here's looking at you, Maria Sharapova), the unladylike grunts are ruining the game, say the officials, and need to be toned down.

When the young Floridians in Surfer Blood chose the Pixies classic 'Gigantic' for A.V. Undercover, we assumed that one of them would just have to come up with a falsetto. Instead, they recruited their friend Sarah Baldwin--drummer for The Girls At Dawn--to take the lead.

If nothing else, you can check out Low doing Toto's "Africa". It's disconcertingly earnest and almost ethereally beautiful when it's not clunky and strange. Some fascinating possibilities left with the as yet uncovered songs still out there, too.